


Beat the Devil’s Tattoo

by bluesyturtle



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Child Death, Crack Treated Seriously, Flashbacks, Food, Gen, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Implied/Referenced Suicide, India, Inspired by Music, Internal Monologue, Jealousy, Manipulation, Minor Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Motorcycles, On the Run, Psychological Drama, Road Trips, Scars, Season/Series 02, Tags Are Fun, Weird Plot Shit, What Have I Done, What Was I Thinking?, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 14:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3294038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will doesn’t give Chilton up to Crawford, which means any number of things can happen next.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>OR</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Ha~ that one time I wrote 36 pages of Chilton that no one asked for, ever. You’re welcome??</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beat the Devil’s Tattoo

**Author's Note:**

> _There is no peace here / War is never cheap, dear / Love will never meet here / It just gets sold in parts / You cannot fight it / All the world denies it / Open up your eyelids / Let your demons run_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> When you’re alone like he was alone / You’re either or neither / I tell you again it dont apply / Death or life or life or death / Death is life and life is death / I gotta use words when I talk to you / But if you understand or if you dont / That’s nothing to me and nothing to you / We all gotta do what we gotta do  
> \- T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Agonistes” (misspelling is Eliot’s)

“I have to leave the country,” he says without aplomb. There’s nothing he can pepper onto it to make it graceful or elegant or sophisticated. It’s no matter. He’s just scrubbed himself down in Will’s shower and been sniffed by all six—seven—of his dogs while pacing and pulling at his hair. “I am leaving the country.”

Somewhere along the way he’s sure he had some dignity. Maybe he left it where Hannibal stashed Abel Gideon’s body. Folly to mourn it now.

“Running will only make you look guilty.”

“You didn’t run, and you looked plenty guilty.”

That shuts him up pretty quickly, though they’re not done talking about it. Will has more to say on the topic, maybe. He looks calm as a Hindu cow. Chilton has no intention of letting him sit here and not have anything to say to him but _I told you so, Frederick._

And he is saying that, though he doesn’t say much unless Chilton directly demands a response from him.

“I’m going to catch him.”

“I know you will,” Chilton says, convinced, though an idea occurs to him, half-realized and slippery, so slippery. “And when you do, I will read about it from a secure location far from here.”

Will’s face is serene still, eyes placid. Chilton huffs, straightens his back, and squares his shoulders.

“Oh, what the hell. If you stay here,” Chilton beseeches, stepping forward, “He’ll kill you. You know it’s the truth.”

He doesn’t move from his seat.

“Leave it with Jack Crawford, Will. He’s got his dead, mutilated agents and consultants and murderers. Don’t become one of them.”

He says again, “I’m going to catch him, Frederick.”

“You aren’t listening.”

“I hear you just fine.”

“But you aren’t _listening,_ damn you. Come away with me.”

He hears horrible romantic music playing in his ears, imagines his hair blowing in the wind on some tragic, beautiful beach where they say their fond farewells. Will stands. His face is confused, almost amused—probably _a lot_ amused. Chilton adamantly does not deflate at his clearly doubtful expression.

“Go _away_ with you? Go away with _you_?”

“What’s the alternative? You throw away your life chasing the devil, trying to capture the sulfurous smoke that is Hannibal Lecter in your hands? He eats people, for God’s sake! Jack Crawford _knows_ he eats people, and there’s nothing he can do to pin it on him. Oh, but he pinned me! Abel Gideon tried to take the blame first and Hannibal _Lecter_ —” he laughs, miserable and desperate, “—Hannibal Lecter dismembered him and _ate_ him alive! He’s a maenad’s _wet dream_.”

He’s hysterical now, he knows. Will catches on because he is who he is, mirror neurons and empathy and all.

In his same docile, gentle tone, he says, “Running makes you look guilty, and running _with_ you makes me look complicit.”

“Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t like it.”

It’s a low jab, _God,_ he knows it is, but let him bite. Chilton holds his breath, watching the gears turn in Will’s brain. Goddamn, he can _see_ him considering it, how deeply affected Hannibal would be if Will left with _Chilton_.

Chilton turns on the charm, fully aware of how sleazy this territory is that he’s encroaching upon.

“What would Hannibal think if you rescued me, Will, of all people?”

He’s selling himself. Will furrows his eyebrows. Chilton’s ready to hear spiel, lecture, philosophy on his obligation to stay behind and sacrifice himself for the cause that is Hannibal Lecter and his prospective victims, he is. He’s ready to let Will have his say and go on about his duty, his _responsibility._

And then he changes his mind. He changes it with the velocity of a thunderstorm churning out lightning bolts.

“You are not obligated to die for that man! _I_ am not obligated to wear his chains. _You_ are not obligated to wear his chains.”

“You didn’t have any trouble telling everyone I did at my trial,” Will seethes, all low, biting calm to Chilton’s histrionic outbursts.

“Well, I thought you were guilty, didn’t I? All the evidence pointed to you, and you were in my hospital. Hannibal was my _colleague_ , and you were a gutted frog I wanted to study under a microscope. Is that what you want to hear? Abel Gideon I molded like clay—maybe I wanted the prestige that would have come with catching the Ripper, maybe I wanted to believe I was…” he falters, throwing his arms and very deliberately lowering his voice and keeping it even, “…was a good enough psychiatrist to catch him by myself. Do you believe that?” He throws his hands again, very determined now to take Will with him. “Do you believe any of that?”

He becomes the exposed amphibian then, under the magnifying lens of Will’s scrutiny. He is flayed, Chilton is, and it’s actually not horrible. Chilton expects to feel great swells and surges of emotion and shame, but Will’s just looking at him, isn’t he? Chilton’s just being looked at, and whatever Will decides, Chilton is beyond being able to change it anymore.

Reluctantly, for reasons—many reasons—Chilton thinks he can probably place, Will murmurs, “Yes, I believe you.”

Chilton stares at Will and can’t fathom what he sees when he looks back at him. All Chilton sees is a tired man, someone who had too much to lose but lost it all anyway, with no guarantee that he would ever get it back.

“I’m leaving the country,” Chilton repeats his words, whispering them. “Please come with me.”

“What, to make Hannibal jealous?”

“To get the hell _away_ from him,” Chilton corrects him, still pleading. He considers Will’s question, though. “And yes, it would make Hannibal very jealous.”

Will scoffs.

“If you try to tell me the thought doesn’t appeal to you I won’t believe you.”

Will deflects, “You want to make him jealous, Chilton. I want him to rot.”

“And that’s what makes you so different from me, is that where you’re going with this?”

Just like that they’re arguing.

“It’s a bigger picture than what you can give me,” Will says offhandedly, like Chilton is offering him a handkerchief and not a chance to step off the merry-go-round. “I gave up my life for him once already. You want me to do it for you now?”

Chilton looks around at the dogs coming in and out of the room, the big house beginning to stack up with new and old additions of clutter, and the subdued sunlight filtering in through fog and transparent curtains dressing the windows. Chilton’s house is bigger, cleaner, and he doesn’t have dogs, but Will’s residence isn’t so unfamiliar he couldn’t observe the parallels.

“It’s not about fantasy or indulgence, you self-absorbed…”

“ _I’m_ self-absorbed.” Will’s voice lilts ironically, his tone creeping up in sludge-like increments. “Every psychiatrist within a fifty mile radius wants to get inside my head, and I’m self-absorbed.”

“Oh, give yourself some credit, Will, a hundred, at least.”

Will laughs loudly, walks around Chilton and makes for the den.

“I’m calling Jack Crawford.”

“Will, for the love of God,” Chilton shouts, going after him and upsetting a handful of Will’s many hounds. He gets his hand over Will’s and stops him from making the call, though the number is queued up, Chilton can read as much on the screen. “Please, don’t.”

The dogs bark, and Will is staring at him again.

“I’ve got your evidence in my shower, Frederick. People will talk.”

“Oh,” he grunts in his exasperation, prying the cell phone out of Will’s hand easily but only hampered by the minute tremor in his own hand. “I couldn’t give less of a damn about people.”

“Well, that’s the difference, right there, between you and me.”

He’s willing to accept it, but he’s also ready for a fight because while he can’t make Will believe anything he isn’t already inclined to believe, he can push back up until the moment Will makes a decision. He hasn’t yet, made a decision.

“If you still need to tell yourself that.”

Chilton watches Will, assesses him, just like Will watches and assess him. There are no boundaries left between them, not really. Chilton knows Will was wronged just like Will knows Chilton has been wronged in exactly the same way. Pretense has long since gone out of the room. Chilton didn’t bring it in with him. If Will had any left to his name, it’s gone the same way.

Flatly, unassumingly, Will asks, “Where were you going to go?”

“Honestly,” Chilton huffs, disgruntled, “Nowhere fast.”

Will regards him, and the look in his eyes is something touched, just the tiniest fraction, with pity. Chilton supposes he deserves that. Maybe it’s more, still, than he should hope to receive from Will, this man who he would have picked apart and would have seen fry if only he’d been a cleverer man, like the one who’d broken them both.

God, he wishes he could do something, anything, to spite Hannibal Lecter. He wishes for justice, and Will can mete it out, Chilton has no doubt of his ability, but he also craves vengeance, something he doesn’t feel like he ever will be able to take if Will stays behind now. If he stays behind Hannibal will destroy him, and Chilton doesn’t doubt that either, and damn it, that would be a travesty.

He says to Will, who is still contemplating him in morose silence, “So are you if you stay here.”

A clock on a wall or mantelpiece somewhere clicks, and Chilton can sense every one of those seconds sliding down and shivering off him like rain. Will sighs, looking around again at his dogs.

“I’m going to do you a favor.”

“Will.”

“Listen to me.” His voice is so steady, so intentional, that Chilton does what he’s told. Will’s phone is still in his hand. He grimaces when Will reaches for it but doesn’t let it go and closes his eyes when Will doesn’t try to take it from him. “You brought a gun with you, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Get it out.”

Weary and high-strung he asks, “Why?”

“I want you to shoot at the fireplace.”

He points as he walks further into the room. Chilton waits, numb, while Will goes through the motions of herding his dogs out of the room. They obey him immediately, and Chilton wonders aimlessly how anyone could ever have believed he were capable of doing something as careless as letting himself be caught and found guilty on multiple murder charges. Serial killers could have pets and be good to them, sure, but Will Graham, standing apart from the crowd, wouldn’t leave these dogs.

Chilton doesn’t have anyone and he’s easier to pin in that regard — because people don’t like him, typically. Well, Matthew Brown had acted as if he did. It makes more sense that he did it to get to Will, actually, and Chilton can’t even summon up the willpower to be upset about it anymore, trivial as it is.

Gideon should have let Brown be Will’s angel of death. They’d all be happier for it.

A door opens and closes. Will returns to the den.

“Here,” Will says, beckoning with his hand once the room is safely cleared.

Chilton goes, staring and making an unattractively bewildered expression.

“Shoot over my shoulder.”

“What…?”

“There has to be a struggle,” Will tells him coolly. “I can’t just invite you in and then send you on your way. That would be obstruction.”

Chilton sneers. “Yes and how unlike you to break the law.”

“Weren’t you paying attention, Frederick?” Will lifts Chilton’s arm up near his ear, fingers holding loosely around Chilton’s wrist and warming his hand. “I’m an innocent man.”

“Innocent, my ass.”

He pulls the trigger, and Will’s eyes squeeze shut at the sound so close to his ear drum, but he doesn’t flinch away from the gunshot. He hisses through his teeth and repositions Chilton’s arm, glancing over his shoulder to check the angle. His stance wobbles and he turns to face forward.

“Again,” he mutters, eyes pinching shut.

Chilton hesitates, finger twitching over the cradle of the trigger. He says, “You’re bleeding.”

Will waves a hand before Chilton gets the second word out.

Clutching at Chilton’s arm more firmly, he grits out, “Shoot.”

Chilton swallows. The gun is heavier than it has any right to be, obscenely heavy, really. It throws his balance in an awkward sort of way that’s like being on a moving ship. He hadn’t realized the first time he pulled the trigger that he might hurt Will—stupid, now that he sees the blood trickling down the side of Will’s neck.

“Really, just—” he stammers, dropping his hand to his side and digging out a white bobbin lace handkerchief he’s carried around with him since Gideon put his insides on the outside. He wads it up between his fumbling fingers and dabs at the steady streak of red coloring Will’s skin. Mumbling, he asks, “Would you believe that’s the first time I’ve fired a gun?”

“Yes.”

He rolls his eyes.

“I’m thrilled that your worldview of me hasn’t changed in light of recent events.”

“You’re corrupt and unethical.” Will doesn’t stop his efforts to dab his neck clean, though the blood has stained him. It’s stained his shirt, too. Chilton keeps at it. “If Hannibal hadn’t done this to you, you’d still be corrupt and unethical.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be a murderer.”

Chilton takes the handkerchief away and rolls it around in his hand, balling it up. Will extracts it from his palm and gives Chilton a look that’s maybe a touch concerned.

“After the doctors sewed everything Gideon removed back in, they put me on blood thinners, and when they did that, I had nosebleeds every other day. It was splendid.” He nods at the handkerchief. “I may not like being covered in the stuff, but I’m certainly not squeamish. I am useful for one or two things, as it happens.”

Will makes a face at him, just looking up from Chilton’s mouth.

“Are you…” Will’s eyes drop again. “…reading my lips?”

Testily, Will tells him in a loud voice, “You shot two inches away from my ear.”

“And you’re asking me to do it again.”

“Lower down this time, like you’re going for my arm.”

He raises Chilton’s arm at level with his shoulder, and Chilton steps back instinctively.

“I’m not shooting your _arm_. Aiming near your ear was different.”

“You’re not shooting my arm, Frederick,” he answers plainly, blinking the disorientation from his eyes and subtly regaining his balance. “Go for the fireplace.”

Chilton sighs, steps back into place, and shoots. The fireplace pings under the impact of the second bullet.

“My apologies for your furniture.”

“It’s seen its fair share of abuse.”

Will taps Chilton’s wrist in silent command for him to put the gun away, so Chilton stares at it for a moment, holding it at an awkward angle away from his body, and setting it down on the nearest surface. Will is giving him another soft look that’s sick with either pity or disgust, Chilton can’t tell which.

“I’m going to give you thirty minutes, and then I’m going to call Jack Crawford.”

“Thirty minutes,” he laughs. “If I had a week I don’t know where I would go.”

“You have thirty minutes.”

“Splendid.” He starts to look around for his things and marches toward the door, belatedly doubling back for the gun he’ll probably have to toss somewhere along the way. He stops short of reaching for the handle and says over his shoulder, “Third time’s the charm?”

He’d rather not ask it again in so many words. Will apparently doesn’t want to refuse him, which is extremely intriguing. It’s a damn shame they don’t have time for it. Strange to think that _time_ is now the one constraint they have working against them. He had thought once that they had all the time in the world and that Will would never be more to him than a fun, psychiatric experiment in psychopathy and empathy disorder.

Trust Will Graham to be the one person who is more interesting innocent than he is guilty, more appealing sane than he is crazy.

“Twenty-nine,” Will says, and Chilton is out the door, and he doesn’t look back.

\--

There’s a manhunt, of course. There’s nothing so ostentatious as a helicopter chase or a firefight on some busy metropolitan freeway. He abandons his car in a bus station and rides five hours to New York, lurking in the shadows until he can find someone at JFK with a ticket going somewhere, anywhere. He knows the extradition countries, looks for names like Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Cuba, etc.

He finds someone standing outside the gate for Bangkok and offers five thousand dollars for the ticket. The first person he propositions turns him down; the second tells him okay.

The thing about bribes is he had enough cash on hand to maybe survive for a day in whatever country he ended up lucky enough to shack up in. He tells the woman, pretty and young, to give him a few hours to get the money because _hey, what kind of idiot would I have to be to carry that much money on my person in an airport, really?_

He wishes he were the type of idiot, frankly.

Will said Jack Crawford would trace the cards if Chilton used them, so Chilton hasn’t used a single one, though he didn’t scrap them like he said he would. He’d been looking ahead to this moment, standing before the ATM machine at ten minutes to the gates opening with his debit card crushed and trembling between his fingers.

He has money enough in his saving’s to go anywhere in the world, and that isn’t including the offshore account he means to dip into now.

_Christ,_ he thinks, biting his cheek bloody and forcing the card into the machine, _If they catch me, they catch me._

He’d look guilty enough captured or on the run. There isn’t a huge difference in his mind, but at least this way, he has a shot at escape. He withdraws an absurd amount of money, makes the trade, and gets on the plane, and it’s the worst day of his life.

It’s the worst day of his life, and yesterday he was framed, drugged, and hunted down by police. This day is worse because he’s running for his life while holding perfectly still, flying through the air while sitting straight-backed and rigid for roughly twenty three hours. He doesn’t sleep. When they land in Thailand he gets himself set up in the most decrepit lodge he can find. He doesn’t look very hard, actually, so it’s a rather fine establishment, by all accounts. Still, it could be a dripping alcove carved into the wall, and it would still be bliss for his having made it at all.

He’s sure he left a paper trail— _positive_ Jack Crawford knows where he is even if he can’t do anything about it. With the way Will talked about it, all cool indifference, it would be the easiest thing in the world to prove Hannibal was what they both know him, now, to be.

Chilton hopes it’s easier than fleeing the country has turned out to be because he’s positive he’s almost had a heart attack upwards of six times since he left Wolf Trap. 

His first evening in Thailand, he checks in for a flight at 5:30 the following morning to Bhutan. He stays up all night by the door rubbing his passport with his thumb and bouncing one knee to the tune of his unsteady heartbeat. His phone he’s been without for some time now, but he wishes he had a device on him, something disposable, maybe.

_Why, Frederick?_

It’s Will’s voice in his head.

_Have you got someone you need to call?_

He hasn’t got a soul, and not even a dog to miss him.

Sometime around the two o’ clock mark he leaves all his things in his room and prowls ominously in the shadows outside Lodge 61, monitoring the streets and the front desk until the night plunges into its thickest cast of black. He can’t remember the last time he slept, only that he has a ways left to go before he does.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep._

Go figure that Will would haunt him. Chilton had spent enough time trying to invade his psyche; only fair, then, that the tables turn now.

Jack Crawford’s people don’t bust down the door to his room. No searchlights come cutting through the crawling streets of Bangkok to find him. He collects his things from the predominantly untouched room and nearly collapses waiting for the plane. A man more composed than Chilton is at present pushes a steaming thermos of savory and salty broth into his hands once he’s on his feet again.

It’s _divine_ , whatever the stuff is. It’s _manna_. Chilton hasn’t eaten in…he can’t remember how long.

The stranger is speaking—Thai?—to him, and Chilton has no grasp of the language whatsoever, not at all. He nicked a pamphlet from the airport with some elementary translations glaring up at him and had stared at it for all of two minutes the night before.

He remembers, “Khob khun krap.”

He’d remembered for really arbitrary, mnemonic reasons that the stranger never has to know. It looks like he says it right anyway, American accent aside. He slides the man a thick handful of Baht, not caring in the slightest how much it amounts to in American currency. The man shakes his hand, impressed.

Chilton boards the plane like a ghost when it’s time to leave, and the flight is easier than the waiting, less anxiety-inducing. He gets food in his belly when it occurs to him that if he doesn’t feed himself sufficiently he’ll pass out before they land in Bhutan, which he very much does not want to happen. He drinks any caffeinated beverage he can get his hands on to stay awake and eats most of what his new acquaintance, Ji, orders for him.

When they land and Chilton hasn’t fallen asleep yet he unloads the last of his Baht onto Ji, and the two go their separate ways. In Bhutan at last, Chilton exchanges his dollars for Indian rupees and books a room for the week. He sleeps a full day and then some.

A big part of him still would like to make a call out, but it occurs to him, with the abruptness of a paperweight falling onto his foot, that the only person he has to call is Will.

And he can’t call Will, cannot and will not.

He spends two more weeks in Bhutan not shaving and meticulously updating his wardrobe as befits his surroundings to better fit in. By the end of those two weeks he’s learned a total of a dozen phrases in Dzongkha and which variations of ema datshi really don’t agree with him. It’s one day when he buys that disposable phone he wanted before after he first left home that he buckles and does what he told himself he wouldn’t do.

He rises with the sun and waits, sitting on a low brick wall as the sky changes colors. His thumbs idle over the stiff plastic keypad. When the digital time on the pixelated screen reads 8 AM, he presses call. It’s 10 PM in Wolf Trap, Virginia.

“Hello,” Will answers on the seventh ring. He doesn’t sound bothered, though maybe he’s confused.

“Good evening.”

There’s a pause, something more than hesitation and less than doubt. “Chilton?”

Hearing and loathing how lonely he sounds, he asks, “Is now a bad time?”

“Not especially.”

“Is it a good time?”

“It’s better if I don’t know where you are.”

“So delete the call. I’ll destroy the phone. It was a cheap little thing anyway, only good for this one call.”

_Have you got someone you need to call?_

Chilton swallows. “I needed to hear a familiar voice. There aren’t exactly handfuls of people I can call for said purpose.”

“Well, I’m honored,” Will says flatly. Chilton listens and he can hear him moving around, wind shaking the leaves in the trees, and dogs running and panting. “Jack thinks you’re in Thailand. Tell me you’re not in Thailand.”

“I’m not in Thailand,” Chilton mumbles, looking around the deserted stretch of road on which he’s set himself up. He slouches. “How goes the hunt?”

“It’s going,” Will says, and Chilton imagines him shrugging, not wanting to have this conversation with him.

“But you’re not.”

_Honestly, nowhere fast._

“Let me guess,” Chilton continues, when Will doesn’t reply, “You haven’t found anyone dead since I’ve been away.”

Will drawls, “Somebody ought to give you a medal, Chilton.”

He rolls his eyes, correcting his posture by pressing his shoulders back and lifting his chin slightly.

“I should tell you Jack showed you to Miriam Lass and she became very upset.”

“What do you mean, he showed me to her?” He squirms slightly where he’s sitting, skin crawling at the implication. “Became upset how?”

“Video feeds from the hospital, recordings from the trial, et cetera.” Chilton listens to Will tramping over what sounds like freshly fallen snow. “She identified you as the Chesapeake Ripper.”

For a few strained seconds Chilton can only blink and squeeze the phone in his hand. Once the tension passes a laugh tickles out of his throat and overtakes him. His small piece of Bhutan is empty, and the few people roaming the streets are wakeful and present. They glance his way and whisper, but they don’t try to stop him. Will doesn’t either. Chilton’s sides are splitting. He laughs until his heart aches too much for him to breathe without sobbing.

He drops his head so his chin tucks into his chest and forgets, splendidly, that Will is listening to him breathe on the other line. Chilton shakes his head and tries to speak but can’t.

“Everybody loves you for the Ripper,” Will tells him, voice muted strangely around the gentle sounds of winter.

Chilton thinks to ask if Will is enjoying this, if he likes seeing him brought down to size and made to run for his life like the insect he’s been reduced to. He thinks to ask it just like that, but he doesn’t want Will to tell him he’d been an insect all along. Today he can’t stomach it. He’s content enough to be hated. Ambivalence isn’t unfamiliar territory.

“Well, it makes terrible _heaps_ of sense, doesn’t it?” Chilton watches his voice, not caring to yell without a proper cause to bring attention to himself, though he is _healthily_ exasperated. “I walk with a cane, for God’s sake. My remaining kidney couldn’t handle the protein in human steaks even if I _wanted_ to murder and cannibalize people.”

“You’re also quite short,” Will supplies lightly, _helpfully._

He complains, “We can’t all be giants.”

“The bigger they are,” Will says.

Dourly Chilton concludes, “The wider the imprints of their shoes when they step on you.”

Will surprises him by laughing, not as Chilton had before but a small, reserved chuckle. It’s the equivalent of a bar of gold falling unexpectedly into the poverty-stricken household of his isolated psyche.

“Hannibal hasn’t snuffed you out yet.”

“No, and I have you to thank for that.” It isn’t even said with gravity or solemnity. It’s said in the fashion of one commenting on how strong the coffee came out that morning. Not quite hitting that blessed casual note now that he’s listening to himself trying to voice it correctly, he adds, “How is your ear?”

“No permanent damage,” Will says in a reading-headlines-out-of-the-newspaper voice.

His easiness calls on Chilton’s calm and bids it to stay.

“What a relief not to have that on my conscience.”

“Just think how upset Hannibal would be,” Will says, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Oh, I don’t know. He seemed to be quite fond of watching you run around solving Jack Crawford’s cases half-broken.”

Quietly, peculiarly, Will says, “Wind him up and watch him go.”

Chilton looks around and the sun has risen higher around him over what he can see of the horizon. It’s funny to think about it as the perceivable end of his sight when it doesn’t even touch what Will can see when he looks up in any direction. They’re a world apart, ten hours removed in time.

“Are you going to tell Jack Crawford I called, Will?”

If the answer is yes, Chilton can’t call him anymore. There would be traces involved, tricky surveillance measures he doesn’t trust himself to foresee. If the answer is no…

“I’m not going to tell him.”

“Why not?”

They’re quiet then, withdrawing into the static and the sounds of the dawn and peaceful nightfall. He imagines Will shrugging again. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“You ought to get on that then,” Chilton tuts. He picks at a loose thread erupting from the overlarge sleeve of his beige knit sweater. “My offer stands.”

“I’m not going away with you.”

But Chilton isn’t disheartened to hear it. Will doesn’t sound irritated or repulsed or frustrated. It sounded like an old familiar joke tumbling off his lips, like a secret given out of mild intoxication and relaxation. Chilton supposes it is an old joke between them now, something either of them could allude to in saying, _Remember that time I asked you to run away and become a fugitive with me, good times._

It is an inside joke, an allusion. An idea flowers in Chilton’s mind. “What if there was a way to do it so that only Hannibal would ever know?”

There’s a short, contemplative silence, and then Will is humming. He says, “Explain.”

“First tell me something,” Chilton muses, smirking and squinting into the risen sun that has since cast Will’s portion of the world into shadow. “Which would you prefer, Dubai or Kazakhstan?”

“Dubai,” Will says.

“Ah, well, I’m changeable then, I suppose.”

“Changeable for what?”

“Will Graham, I hardly think anyone could blame you for taking a vacation.”

\--

The plane comes in three weeks later on a Tuesday morning. Monday night finds Chilton unable to sleep. He expects for the bleak, toneless hours to drag; he’s braced for the long tedium and anticipation of one caught waiting for another who is far away. No such luck. The morning brings Will to him like the winter solstice, which is to say the sky raises the sun up faster than Chilton can collect himself.

Chilton doesn’t go to the airstrip. He sits on his low brick wall with a walking stick held between his two gloved hands and his back to the road. Sometime around noon there are footsteps that close in, one lone pair of booted feet sloshing melted snow and wet soil.

A denim leg swings over the wall and then another, and beside him sits Will Graham. Chilton doesn’t look. Appearances deceive, and he’s had enough of the chase, as sorry as he is to say so.

“Nice view,” Will says.

Chilton hums, shrugs one shoulder, and rubs the walking stick between his hands like he means to start a fire.

“It’s not the Four Seasons.”

Will snorts. “Did you think life as a fugitive would be glamorous?”

“No FBI breaking down my door, no psychiatrists incorrectly profiling me, and no Hannibal Lecter looking smug while he tears my life apart,” Chilton murmurs, shrugging again with one shoulder. “This is as glamorous as it gets.”

They don’t speak then, not for a long time. The sun creeps along its voyage in the clear blue sky, and he remembers Will is probably hungry or tired or miserable with jetlag. He has a few days’ worth of food in the mini fridge and a bed with a sizeable pillow and a clean sheet for it in his suitcase somewhere, maybe in the bathroom. 

“Did you get yourself a room somewhere?”

“Near the airstrip there was a pretty nice hotel hidden away in the trees.”

“In Sakenang?”

Chilton positively swells when the city’s name doesn’t trip off his tongue completely Westernized or clunky. He looks halfway at Will but mostly continues to stare out over the trees and farther off, the winding river.

“No, in Thimphu,” Will says.

“Not the Taj Tashi?” Chilton does look at Will now, noting the ruffled set of his dark, recently shorn hair. He purses his lips when Will nods once. Enviously, he mutters, “Oh, you tourist.”

“Somebody said I needed a vacation,” Will retorts.

“You do.”

They fall into calm silence again. Chilton’s restless. He is comfortable and helplessly relieved to be in the company of someone who knows and believes him, but the respite is momentary. It will not sustain itself. Will, when his life demands it of him, will depart again, and Chilton will be left with the din and swill of his mistakes. The irony will never cease to amuse and chastise Frederick that this is where life chose to take him—that his actions, and his inactions, led him to this brick wall in Bhutan at noonday with Will Graham of all people.

“Are you hungry?” he asks to be considerate and because even though Will has a place of his own while he’s here, he’s sitting now with Chilton.

“I could eat.”

Chilton rises from the wall, speechless, and makes for the small, tidily kept up room he’s been holed up in since he fled first the States and then Thailand. Will doesn’t follow him, so Chilton goes in by himself and pulls the door closed haphazardly behind him. He bustles around in the broom-closet-sized kitchen and sets a heaping portion of barthu over one hot plate and another hefty amount of kewa datse on the other. He stands and stirs, alternating between the two dishes and using the same fork for the noodles as he does for the potatoes.

The door opens, and Will comes in to hover near the mouth of the kitchen, effectively blocking Chilton’s way out, not that he cares a lick about it.

“Fried noodles,” he offers as he points delicately with the fork to indicate the dish, “or cheesy potatoes?”

Will muses, “No meat?”

“Why?” Chilton mumbles to match Will’s tone. “Got a hankering for human flesh?”

He just sees Will lowering his chin. “The noodles, please.”

Chilton provides Will with a glass of water from the tap when he refuses the Arra and takes a tall glass of the warming beer for himself. They eat at a sturdy, ancient wooden table halfway in between the sink and the bed. Chilton gives Will the nicest of his three modest, practical porcelain bowls to use. He hasn’t eaten anything since last night, so he’s starving. After his first few days on the run had shown him hunger sharper than what he’s accustomed to experiencing, his threshold has grown much feebler.

He wants to blame his kidney or his intestines or stress or _something_ , but Occam’s razor suggests he likes to be fed because he’s used to being fed. Food in his belly means he’s secure; it means he isn’t running. It’s not a glamorous existence, but he’s making do. He rubs at his beard, grown beyond the point of stubble but maintained against unruliness. He rubs one way with his hand along the left side of his jaw and then rubs the other way along the right. He should probably shave it.

“I didn’t think you’d let it get to you,” Will says in between bites.

Chilton watches his bowl and then Will’s before pointing his gaze toward the one curtained window at the front of the room. His full belly reassures him this experience won’t get him killed, but he isn’t safe. There’s no way he can be safe, not even around Will. Maybe _especially_ not around him.

He asks, ravenously curious, though it isn’t present in his voice purely by accident, “Which part?”

“The frame-up, having to run…” Will waves the hand holding his fork. “The smearing of your career and reputation, your life falling apart.”

“Oh,” Chilton hums, “that part.”

“That part,” Will confirms.

Chilton takes a long drink of the Arra and licks his lips without setting his glass down. He looks at Will and raises his hand slightly as if in a toast. “Sic semper tyrannis.”

Just as stoic as Chilton is, though he’s less loose about the joints for his refusal to partake, Will says, “Don’t tell me you’re depressed.”

“I would be depressed if they’d caught me. They haven’t.” He sighs, “Ergo, I am not depressed.”

“You’re depressed.”

“No,” Chilton says in a firm voice, followed by nothing else.

Will doesn’t push him. It wouldn’t yield fruitful results, and they both know it. The weeks of solitude have made Chilton docile and indifferent to the fact. Just three weeks ago he’d conspired with Will to do something insidious and damaging to Hannibal Lecter’s peace of mind. It’s much later after Chilton’s washed their dishes and set the kitchen back to rights when Will says, “You shouldn’t wallow, Chilton. It’s unattractive.”

He makes a face and follows Will when he goes for the door, half expecting the FBI to storm in. Only the flood of daylight bombards him.

“I haven’t touched a hairbrush in weeks,” he says, going with Will to sit on the brick wall. His walking stick is where he left it propped up on the brick. Chilton takes it up and moves it between his hands once more, wondering if there’s any way he could start a fire amid all this slush. “There’s something liberating about madness.”

“You haven’t always thought that?”

“No,” Chilton answers. He moves the word around slowly in his mouth. There’s nothing else he has to say on the matter, even in spite of _everything_ demanding to be said. He shrugs and adds, offhandedly, “To me it’s always been cages and drugs and tests.”

Will says, “Boxes.”

“Ether,” Chilton corrects him. “You could bind a man and induce him and label him, but there’s always something beneath the rest of it.” He rubs his tongue over his front teeth. “Something you can’t quite see or make sense of.”

He’s wrong about human complexity. Humans are easy to figure out; they’re easier to manipulate. Chilton is human, after all. Will is, and Jack Crawford and Alana Bloom and Hannibal Lecter are. Abel Gideon was. Abigail and Garrett Jacob Hobbs were. Chilton swallows and looks up at the sky. Snowflakes burst apart on his forehead and cheeks. The heat radiating off his body decimates the tiny, prismatic structures with the first killing touch of his skin.

He has the immensely poetic thought that Hannibal Lecter is just a man—just any common man—with a regular core temperature of 98.6 degrees melting every snowflake that happens to flutter into his path. The difference is in the details, loitering and making a home beside the devil.

“Is that why you did it?”

“Which?” Chilton asks.

“Psychiatry.”

“No, hardly,” Chilton mumbles. He lifts his walking stick and examines the sodden base of it saturated with melted snow. “I went into psychiatry because a friend showed me _Cuckoo’s Nest_ when I was sixteen.”

Will turns on him, a disbelieving expression on his face. Chilton half expects him to call his bluff, but it’s halfway in between a lie and a truth, so he believes before he can see it on Will’s face that he won’t be made to elaborate.

“Why did _you_ do it,” Chilton asks flatly, slowly twirling his soggy walking stick between his hands like a baton. “Why did you do any of it?”

Will blinks at him and then at the horizon stretched out before them of treetops, snowfall, and delicately sloshing rivers farther off, black-teal beneath the overcast sky. He figured there’d be weather to contend with today. It had been sun and cool breezes up until about a week ago. Trust Bhutan’s climate to go haywire with Will Graham’s arrival—winter solstice and all that.

“Was a time when I felt like I had to do it.”

Naively, ignorantly, Chilton asks, “Not anymore?”

“Anymore,” Will sighs, hot breath steaming as it leaves his lips. “I’m just about sick of it all.”

Chilton hums and doesn’t even have to force the blasé chord in his words. “Wonder what that’s like.”

“You’ve been on the run for a month,” Will tells him, unimpressed.

“It’s amazing I made it out of the _country,_ ” Chilton snaps bitterly, ire sparking, though not quite flaring within him. “It’s amazing you _let_ me make it out of the country.”

Probably rolling his eyes, Will says, “I didn’t let you do anything.”

“Oh, no.” Chilton shakes his head, sarcasm kindling the embers of his temper. He laughs, “No, you didn’t let me shoot a gun at your fireplace and damage your _hearing_ in the process—”

Will interrupts him, “The hearing loss was only temporary.”

“You didn’t let me wipe the _blood_ off your neck with my ridiculous handkerchief.” 

“Give yourself some credit, Chilton, it was a _lace_ handkerchief.”

Chilton looks at him, equally unimpressed and growing steadily impatient at the circumstances. “ _Bobbin_ lace, _Graham._ ”

They’re watching each other, and an intrusive idea strikes him right as a smirk starts twitching onto Will’s face. Humans are so easily manipulated.

Chilton sighs, put out, and looks away. “Will, I have a question.”

“Just one?”

“Well, it’s the only one you’re going to get out of me.”

A confusing expression flickers over Will’s face, the cockiness of a contestant confidently accepting a challenge. Chilton averts his eyes. Will Graham can do whatever he wants, and Chilton can do nothing, has no platform upon which to stand, has no doctorates or degrees or anything that carries any meaning whatsoever, not anymore. He doesn’t even have his big empty house or his expensive showy car or the Montblanc fountain pen he’s not sure why he ever had in the first place. He hadn’t even known it was on his person until he found himself patting down his pockets in that pawn shop in Philadelphia on his way to New York.

He clears his throat, brings his shoulders down to rest so they’re not up by his ears anymore. It’s chilly out but not to the point that he should be shivering in his jacket. He takes it for a sign that he’s sleep-deprived and isn’t surprised in the slightest.

“Why didn’t he just kill you?”

“I told you already,” comes the reply too quickly.

“Yes, yes, he wants to be your friend.” Chilton waves his hand vaguely, clearing the air of the stale, empty answer. “Why?”

“What do you care?”

“You mean because I couldn’t publish my findings in a journal somewhere? Because I couldn’t put my name on some article and go on about the mysteries of your mind and what happens when it’s set aflame by a mind like Hannibal Lecter’s?”

Chilton turns to leer at Will, feeling more like himself for this banter but less like himself for the faster pace in his speech that he hasn’t used as much since he first left the States. Will’s look is closed off but oddly receptive to Chilton’s change in mood, not in a way that Chilton could play with or use to provoke him, but still. It’s there, it’s incendiary, he _notices_ it. It’s _refreshing_ to notice it.

“Hannibal Lecter,” Will scowls around the name like it could be a sin just to say it out loud. Chilton supposes it could be, with everything that’s happened. Will licks his lips, taking his eyes away from Chilton’s face to scan their surroundings for the fourth time since they’ve sat down. “Hannibal Lecter wanted us on equal footing with each other.”

Chilton sighs, vexed. “How romantic.”

“He thinks it was.”

“And then you tried to kill him. Touché,” Chilton half-chuckles. “I suppose you know by now the executioner you sent for him had him crucified, balancing on an overturned bucket.”

“The executioner I met in your hospital,” Will coolly reminds him.

“You should thank me,” Chilton says, unfazed and with a straight face. “If not for psychotic murderers hiding in plain sight, how else would you have gone after the one who framed you?”

Will watches him again, eyes probing and intentional. Chilton just looks back because he isn’t nervous to be flayed in a figurative sense when so much has been rended from him literally.

Secretively, Will asks him, “How would you?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“If not for psychotic murderers hiding in plain sight,” Will casually repeats, voice dropping a whole register and becoming very unfairly attractive. “How else would you go after the one who framed you?”

Not understanding, Chilton protests, evenly, “You know I’m not a murderer, Will.”

Will stares at him for a while more and then announces in a quiet voice that he’s leaving and he’ll be back in the morning. He tells Chilton to be ready to go by then because they’re leaving early. Chilton doesn’t even think to ask where or why. He thinks because he asked Will to come up here that he should know what’s going on and why, but he has no idea, not a clue.

And actually, after knowing what every day would have in store for him—wake, bathe, eat, wash, walk, eat, sit, walk, walk, eat, wash, sleep—he’s thankful not to know what’s in store for him tomorrow. As he’s lying down he thinks about what Will said to him before he left for the Taj Tashi, reasons that he probably meant Garrett Jacob Hobbs. If nothing else, perhaps he’d believed for so long that he was guilty, as Gideon had, that he couldn’t separate the episodes he lived from the ones he didn’t.

“Nothing for it,” Chilton mumbles sleepily into his pillow as he sets the alarm on the metallic, bipedal analog clock without getting up. “No one would publish you now anyway.”

\--

Chilton wakes early as per Will’s orders. He’s dressed and chopping a mango just shy of ripe into squares when a knock comes at his door. Securing a gradient green and red patch of mango skin in between his teeth, he goes and opens the door for Will. He notices several things simultaneously about Will’s arrival, but the thing that stands out to him immediately is the cane in his hand.

For a few very long seconds the cane is the only thing that exists in Chilton’s mind, not Bhutan, not Baltimore, not his violated insides, not his slandered outsides, not Hannibal Lecter or Jack Crawford.

Just the cane and Will’s fingers closed around it.

Those few seconds flutter away from him and Chilton can see what else he’s carrying: a helmet under his arm and a second extended to Chilton. It’s a neat little balancing act is what it is, and Chilton can’t help but read too much into the symbolism behind it—Will Graham, balancing what was done to him and what he did, balancing his official life in Baltimore and this stolen binge with Chilton, balancing what he knows he has the power to change and what he knows he _must_ change regardless of his ability to make it happen.

The sun’s just beginning to rise behind him. Its inexact tinctures of the burnt reds and tangerine oranges in those extravagant rays lends the image of a fire burning just over Will’s head, a radiant corona anointing him in the chilled, calm morning.

“You shouldn’t have,” Chilton says lamely, accepting the proffered helmet and chewing the tough rind in his mouth. His eyes inevitably track back to the cane in Will’s hand, sullen yearning and curiosity brewing in his heart.

“Can’t have you dying on me now.” Will steps into the room and hands off the cane, dropping his voice as Frederick gingerly takes possession of the cane by its handle. “Have you eaten?”

“Just some fruit,” he says distractedly, looking from the cane to the motorcycle parked a few feet from the door left ajar. “Were you looking for real estate in the area, too? Should I be concerned?”

“It’s a rental, Chilton. Close the door.”

Chilton closes the door and dumbly observes the helmet held between his arm and his stomach. He squeezes the brass handle of the cane. It’s in the shape of an eagle’s head.

Shakily, he doesn’t know why, he asks, “Where are we going?”

“Bodh Gaya,” Will answers expertly. “Three hours out.”

His head clears at the name, semi-familiar. He jostles the helmet clumsily between his hands.

“On _that_ thing?”

“What, you’ve never ridden a motorcycle either?”

Will moseys into the kitchen and brings the bowl of chopped mango squares to the table. He sits when Chilton does and eyes on the helmet resting uncertainly in his lap with some amusement.

“I have, actually,” Chilton tells him, minutely annoyed at the use of the word _either_. “Thank you very much.”

Unassumingly but knowingly, Will guesses, “College?”

Chilton hums and nods his head. He leans the cane against the back of his chair and moves the helmet onto the table. “Grad school.”

“Boyfriend or roommate?”

Chilton looks up, neither shocked nor affronted. He doesn’t object, but Will does have it wrong.

He says, popping a pale orange square of mango into his mouth with his fingers, “It was a cousin actually.”

“Were you close?”

Speaking through his restored apathy, Chilton says, “What does it matter to you if we were?”

Will watches him, face perfectly devoid of an interpretable emotion. If one does exist there somewhere, maybe Hannibal Lecter could divine it. Chilton can’t. It’s no longer a blow to his pride or his ego that he can’t.

“It doesn’t,” Will answers.

They eat for a while, picking lazily and aimlessly at the fragmented fruit. Will leaves the last plump, runny pieces for Will and washes his hands in the kitchen. He returns to his seat.

“That cane comes apart.”

“Do you mean to say you sawed halfway through it?”

Will chuckles, and Chilton’s eyes are on the bowl so he misses what his face looks like, but it sounds wholesome enough. He’s willing to believe it, even if it is a lie.

“No, it comes unscrewed in two places.”

“Convenient for riding on the back of a motorcycle,” Chilton observes daintily, rising to take the bowl to the sink. Will waits for him to wash it and dry his hands before standing, too. “So Bodh Gaya. Any reason you picked a religious site?”

“We’re on a pilgrimage,” Will says by way of explanation.

Chilton waits, but nothing else comes. Will leans down to retrieve Chilton’s cane and hands it off again. “Try it out.”

He takes the offered cane and carries it to the door to take it outside, plucking the wadded up gloves from his jacket pocket and maneuvering them onto his hands. He walks leisurely toward the path he takes every day before sitting down to lunch. Will closes the door behind them. Chilton takes his time getting his fingers accustomed to the familiar shape and presence of a third leg helping his stride. The most recent aid he’d lent his weaker side in walking lately was his snow-ravished walking stick, and it had only ever been for twirling and impaling the earth as he treaded heavily and unevenly upon the grass, dirt, and slush alike.

Will comes to walk alongside him, hands tucked away into his pockets and hair in a more assembled part than it was yesterday. They walk down the stretch of road, the brilliant day around them in great contrast to the gloom and doom Chilton carries with him everywhere he goes. The snow from last night didn’t stick, leaving the ground with the wet look of rain. Winter is in the air, biting at his ears and nose. 

They turn and walk back when Chilton feels comfortable, just beyond the point of his limp dissipating. He turns to Will. “Three hours out, you say?”

“Think you’re up for it?”

“Well, I have to be, don’t I?”

“Yes,” Will says, walking just at Chilton’s elbow, perfectly within reach.

Comfortably easing into his old element with the help of a sturdier gait, Chilton drawls, “Not that I’m worried, but what are the odds this road trip of yours gets me detained?”

“Not very high,” Will promises, though his voice is bland and uninterested. “The unspoken understanding is that you’re the last person I’d ever aid and abet.”

“How charming.”

“You did say so yourself,” Will reminds him casually, no heat behind the words.

Just as calmly, Chilton remarks, “What a lot of trash I say.”

They get back to Will’s rust bucket motorcycle that Chilton does not trust, and Will shows him how to dismantle the cane for easier transport. It’s pretty easy to do except for the higher of the two that sticks slightly. Will shrugs when it gives Chilton a hard time and says he did the best he could with what he had. Chilton doesn’t doubt that he did, though it’s a very strange thing to be so convinced of it.

He crouches to tuck it into the well-worn rack bag slung across the back of the bike. The three dark pieces of gilded wood that comprise his cane fit snugly in between a few large water bottles and a small book with a crinkled map sticking out from between the pages.

They ride for Bodh Gaya and get held up in Patna after about an hour and a half by a stream of cows congregating all along the narrow streets with business establishments and gates on either side of the paved road. Chilton gets a kick out of it, watching Will try to rouse the locals into helping him do something about the cows. He just lounges on the bike and rubs his hands together in the meantime. When the sight loses some of its novelty, which takes a while he isn’t ashamed to admit, he goes to watching the sky with his head tilted back. It’s nice to be in a city after all that time holed up in his room walking a preset trail.

When Will comes back to the bike he has a clear filmy plastic bag filled with little wafers that look like rice cakes.

“The seller called it tilkut,” Will announces, studiously opening the bag.

He passes one off to Chilton before taking a piece for himself. Chilton looks around at the cows and hums, bringing the little disk to his nose to inhale the maple and nutty smell clinging subtly to it. He shrugs and murmurs, “When in India, do not disturb the cows,” and takes a conservative bite.

Will takes a bite, too, slightly bigger, less careful. Chilton watches him chew a few times, slow down, and make a face as he considers the flavors.

Chilton smirks when it becomes clear to him that Will doesn’t like it. “No?”

Will shakes his head, grimacing slightly. “No.”

He eats the rest of it, though, like a trooper. Chilton smiles as he works happily on his snack. It’s childish to be pleased about liking something new that disagrees with Will, but he is. He’s very pleased. Will goes again to another vendor and comes back with something spicy in a small bowl. The smell of it triggers a memory out of Chilton that feels ancient now: Ji feeding him at the air strip in Bangkok.

At the time Chilton hadn’t really noticed the man’s face. He could remember his exact outfit and where the lines in his hands creased when cupped, but Chilton had avoided looking into his eyes, and his face, consequently, was more difficult to remember. He does remember that Ji had straight, off-white teeth and kept his face clean shaven. His ears were small with attached lobes. He sounded a bit like a bailiff when he spoke English, which both unnerved and reassured Chilton, strangely.

He starts to ask Will if the soup is better than the tilkut when someone in the growing crowd starts shouting. They both alert to the noise, though their reactions are very different. Will turns toward it with rigid determination and brazen fearlessness. Chilton flinches toward it, holding his ground.

Two men have begun to argue heatedly over the cows. One of them apparently owns the herd. Will eats his soup, or it might be curry, and observes with Chilton still straddling the motorcycle at his elbow. It’s a comfortable bike.

Enough time has passed since the last time he rode anything remotely like it that its novelty delights him, but not enough time has passed to make it a completely alien experience. It’s a happy medium, he finds. His legs are comfortable, his body trusts the seemingly rickety machine not to fling him off, and his back sinks languidly into a slight slouch at the familiar arrangement of his limbs. He breaks off another piece of tilkut and chews while the spectacle unfolds.

The man not in possession of the cows ends up throwing a right hook to the cow owner’s eye, and a scuffle ensues. Like clockwork the streets flood with people, many of them yelling excitedly. Someone throws or drops a basket that explodes in dusty tan powder upon hitting the pavement. It’s probably sugar, or it might be jaggery. 

“Maybe there’s an alternate route we can take,” Chilton says at last after the people eventually clear out, leaving just a few cows staggered about and still blocking the path. “Even if we can get around them, I very much do not want to get kicked in the head.”

“Waste of twenty minutes,” Will says as he’s finishing off his soup.

He comes back from tossing the container and gets the map out from the bag on the back of the bike. Chilton watches him mark the carefully folded paper with a pencil and swings his leg over the bike to stand. He puts the bag of tilkut away in between bottles of water and hobbles slightly on his feet, robbed of a stand or seat to steady him.

“Wasn’t such a waste.”

Will looks up from his map to fix him with a blank look.

“You liked the tilkut that much?”

Chilton doesn’t answer, and Will studies the map for a moment more, eyes flicking back and forth on the page before he closes it back in the book. He zips and buckles the bag closed and gets his helmet back onto his head. Chilton follows his example and tugs experimentally on the strap to make sure it’s secured. He waits until Will’s back on the bike to reclaim his spot behind him. They ride for another two hours, encountering no more cow-congested roads, to Bodh Gaya. It’s about noon when Will finally parks on an out-of-the-way street corner.

Will tucks the keys to the bike into his jeans pocket and takes the rack bag off the bike after handing Chilton the detached parts of his cane. Chilton already has it assembled by the time Will loosens the bag from its fastenings and has it held by the handle. They walk up the street together, Chilton with his cane and Will with the olive green rack bag. Each carries a helmet tucked up under his free arm.

They walk for a few blocks before the temple looms up like a tower. Chilton stares up at it. Will asks him, “You haven’t left that lodge since you got in, have you?”

Chilton makes a noise and says, “Well.”

“Should I tell you a secret, Chilton?” He waits until Chilton gives him his attention. “Jack doesn’t actually believe you did it.”

Chilton trips over his feet. He shouts, “What?”

Will steadies him and holds his hands up when Chilton’s arms do something frustrated and confused to knock his hands away. He nearly smacks a local woman with his cane accidentally in his outburst, and it’s only then that he lets Will take his cane from him. His voice isn’t hopeful, but some deep, painful emotion that makes his throat ache hollowly fills it. “They’re not investigating me?”

“They have to investigate you.” Will scrubs his hand down his face and walks Chilton down a side street with fewer people around to overhear them. “After everything that went wrong with my case, all eyes are on Jack. The more complicated this gets, the more they’re _going_ to watch him. The evidence…there were bodies on your property. Your clothes were covered in blood they matched to the officers they found at your house.”

“But he doesn’t believe I’m guilty?”

“Jack _wants_ you to be guilty, more than anything, but on a very deep level that he can’t be made to look at right now he knows, like everyone else, that it wasn’t you.”

Chilton rolls his eyes. “What, like everyone knew deep down _you_ weren’t a killer?”

“Everyone knew something about me,” Will says, very cryptically. “They couldn’t see what it really was, not with all the evidence in the way.”

“I’m not—” Chilton partially explodes before dialing back. “I never killed _anyone._ Whatever you did, whatever Hannibal Lecter put into your head that you _could_ do or _might have done,_ you haven’t yet.”

Flatly, “I sent a man to kill him.”

Chilton laughs. He can’t help but laugh. It’s so absurd and impossible that they’re having this conversation. He holds his hands to his forehead, the helpless hilarity shifting into something black and formless. He hears wind behind his eyes, raging and then settling. The urge to scream rages and then settles.

He breathes in and out, laces his fingers over the top of his head, and turns away from Will. The blank void that follows on the heels of his rage casts him into a roaring pit of frustration, worse than the former two because of the expectation that comes bonded to it. It’s disappointment and fear and despair, and Chilton hasn’t let himself war with any of it in all the time that he’s been running. Not a single shred of it.

Some time passes, and two people walking hurriedly down their portion of the street give Chilton strange looks. He feels strange. He feels restless and condemned.

Swiping angrily at the wet smeared under the circles beneath his eyes, Chilton asks, “What are you doing here, Will?”

He waits a moment before replying, “I thought I was taking a vacation.”

Chilton doesn’t say anything, doesn’t trust his throat not to strangle his words on their way out. He just rubs the back of his hand more deliberately over the traitorous evidence on his face.

_People will talk._

“I’m going to catch him,” Will’s actually present, actually concrete voice reminds him.

Chilton shakes his head, sniffling indignantly at his childish display. He wipes his hands on the front of his jacket and turns back to face Will, not looking at him—not going out of his way to look or not look anywhere. Shutting down was easier. It meant less exposure, less pain, less reality. He swallows with some difficulty and takes his cane back. Will crouches to retrieve the helmet Chilton dropped. Chilton takes that back, too.

“I know you will.”

\--

Will holds him captive in the Mahabodhi Temple for upwards of half an hour before Chilton starts to get antsy. He makes an effort, but his mind wanders too much for meditation to be a viable option. Will sinks into it almost effortlessly. He maybe has Chilton to thank for that, all the zoning out and day tripping he did to avoid consciously enduring Chilton and all his inelegant prying.

_Well, I tried, Goddamn it._

Chilton decides to leave Will at the Bodhi tree and goes walking on his own. He attempts to take the rack bag off Will’s hands but is met by opposition as he’s bending to take it up when Will stops him. He doesn’t even open his eyes. His hand just shoots out imprecisely for Chilton’s wrist and clutches at his sleeve. Chilton studies him, but he keeps his eyes closed and his posture relaxed.

“Suit yourself then,” he mumbles in a hushed whisper.

He walks for a while, following the turns in the landscape and the architecture until he encounters a bowl filled with flowers. They’re orange fringed and nectarine red in the bodies of the petals. He follows the trail to a long altar decked out with more offerings. If Chilton had to guess they were cultivated in an indoor garden to protect the buds from temperamental bouts of frost and from the stubborn chill in the air. Chilton backtracks and reads the sign that explains the significance of this place: Buddha’s third week, pacing up and down the walkway and stopping where the lotus flowers have been situated along the raised platform.

_Cankamana – Cloister Walk._

Chilton tries the Walk for himself, leaning his weight and tensing his hand where he needs to in order to keep his gait balanced. He walks up and down, first in straight lines and then in wide loops.

It’s a lot like his preset path outside the lodge. The constant movement and the forethought that goes into every movement distract him from himself, from the babble going on in his mind. There are dark spaces and moments of striking clarity. Some of the darkest moments are the clearest ones; some of the most defined memories are the hardest to make sense of. It’s a mess. He’s a great big mess of a man.

_The bigger they are,_ Will had said and says now in his head.

Chilton looks down at his feet as he comes to a stop.

_We can’t all be giants._

Will finds him some time later by the Jewel House called Ratanaghara when the sun’s moved considerably in the sky. They leave the place together and Chilton waits when Will tells him to wait by the motorcycle. When he returns his first move is to secure the rack bag back in its place. Chilton waits until it’s tightly fastened in place to dissemble his cane. He sets the pieces on top of the book with the map pressed between its pages, and a small reel of glossy postage stamps slides out of the book.

Two stamps are missing, and four are left. The next stamp in line for use reads, _Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan._

“I wouldn’t have thought it like you to leave a paper trail,” Chilton muses. He tucks them back into the book, jostling the severed pieces of his cane in the process. “I suppose that makes things more interesting.”

“What was _your_ plan for letting Hannibal know where we were without tipping everyone else off?”

“I thought you might subtly hint at running away with me at the dinner table and let him put the pieces together—no proof whatsoever, of course, so unable to go to Jack.” Chilton shrugs. “It gives me great pleasure thinking of the look on his face if he ever finds out about you helping me.”

“Oh, I’m sure he already thinks I had something to do with getting you out of the country.”

Chilton sighs, “People always say the dullest things.”

Will gestures at Chilton’s helmet, and he fits it onto his head. 

“Will, tell the truth,” Chilton says softly as Will’s swinging one leg over the seat of the bike. He turns to look at Chilton upon hearing his name. The blank expression on his face comforts Chilton. It isn’t boredom or irritation; it’s calm shot through with apathy, and Chilton doesn’t have to try at all to understand it. “Why did you agree to do this?”

Lightly, he asks, “Which?”

“Partially going away with me.” Chilton gives him a few seconds to answer, and when he doesn’t, he clarifies. “Hearing me out at all when I asked you if you would.”

Will blinks a few times, considering Chilton, doing that thing he does that makes Chilton feel slightly prickly all up the back of his neck. “Get on,” he says.

Chilton bites the inside of his cheek, complying without a voiced complaint or objection. They ride for a while, not as long as the first two trips that took them to Patna and then to Bodh Gaya but still healthily tiring after a morning packed with walking and riding. Chilton keeps up the rigidity holding his body out and away from Will’s throughout the ride, more out of a personal sense of pride than out of decency or respect for Will’s space. He’d mentioned before that he has experience on bikes, and he doesn’t want to look like a lightweight so early on in the trip.

It ends up being another relatively short distance that they go anyway, so Chilton is doubly glad he hasn’t let himself go to jelly and drape himself all around Will’s back like he’s thought about doing a few times already.

“They call this river Sone,” Will says, turning off before they reach the Nehru Setu bridge.

Chilton gets off the bike and stretches his legs. He probably could have gone a bit further without his body complaining too severely for it, but he sees straight away that Will didn’t stop to take a break. The river stretches and disappears into the fog ahead, empty of a horizon and liminal for all that Chilton can’t tell where the water truly ends and where the mist seeping out of the sky begins.

Will hands Chilton the tilkut and even takes a smaller piece for himself before setting the bag on the seat of the bike. He paces a few steps away and eats sparingly of the morsel made from sugar and sesame seeds.

A few birds fly near the surface of the dark, shimmering river, but nothing earthshattering happens. Chilton makes quick work of his tilkut, more because he’s hungry than because it tastes good, though it does. There’s wind shaking the trees farther off and sending ripples through the water the way nerve endings send a message to the brain.

Out of nowhere, after they’ve been watching the Sone for a time, Will says, “So were you, close?”

The answer flickers instantly in Chilton’s mind, but he ruminates on it, holding it to his chest for as long as he can before it starts to resist him. They’re words that want to be said. They’re words that _can_ want.

“She was my favorite.”

“Older or younger?”

Chilton hums around his laugh. “Oh, she was older.”

“By a lot?”

“I always used to think so.”

“But not so much.”

“No.”

“Did she have an accident?”

“Something else killed her.” Chilton shrugs, blinking quickly, though his eyes are dry. His chest pinches in an old, remembered way. “I don’t have an aversion to bikes because she died in a fiery wreck if that’s where you were going with that line of inquiry.”

“I know you don’t have an aversion to bikes.”

Chilton keeps his eyes on the water and eats his second piece of tilkut.

“You’re too comfortable riding to have an aversion to them.”

Chilton rocks on his heels, a move complicated only slightly by the absence of his cane. He hasn’t used it quite enough that he’s become completely reliant on the support it lends, but not having it does still manage to throw his balance. It changes his center of gravity, standing straight and not slanting his posture just so to meet the height of the cane Will bought for him. It’s pretty close, but it’s almost too tall. Chilton’s adjusted accordingly.

“Is she the one who showed you _Cuckoo’s Nest_?”

“Yes.”

Will nods in his peripheral and doesn’t say anything else. When he turns, Chilton gets the helmet back on his head and the tilkut back in the rack bag. He gets on after Will and they hit the road without another word spoken. Just the wind and the quiet babble of the Sone coos at them from all sides. A small flock of orange-and-brown birds flies overhead with inky black feathers fanning out at the ends of their wings. Chilton watches them go, letting his head rest on Will’s back as he tracks their flight.

Once they, too, disappear into the fog dipping its presence into the water Chilton straightens out again. He’s comfortable enough not to want to do it, but he’s sturdy enough that he should, and so he does. They cross the Nehru Setu Bridge, a wealth of a world quietly passing them by, and they don’t stop until they’re in another city with cows in the streets.

Will takes them through the crowded streets, stopping at a red post office box to unzip his jacket and slip a small rectangular card without an envelope through the slot. Chilton watches him do it, silent and understanding what his role is in the whole project, how little it actually has to do with him. He tells himself it’s fine, convinces himself that it is, that he didn’t want anything remarkable or profound or lasting from this impromptu trip that could never sustain itself beyond these few days or weeks or however long they steal together.

They stop to fuel up before leaving the busier part of Uttar Pradesh for the roads, and then they’re off again, riding and riding until the sun starts to set. Chilton’s hungry.

At Kanpur Chilton pulls the bike up to a small restaurant teeming with locals. Chilton orders fried potato dumplings. Will gets a Chinese dish very heavy with eggplant and herds Chilton to a table near the corner of the restaurant while they wait. It’s crowded inside, just enough to be warm with the body heat stored up and moving through the air. Will takes his jacket off, and Chilton opens his but keeps it on. He didn’t take his cane from the rack bag before they came inside. If he really wanted to he could trouble Will to get it out for him since the bag itself is sitting on the chair next to him, but they’re just sitting anyway, so he decides not to bother with it.

Will doesn’t engage him in conversation, so Chilton doesn’t try getting him to talk either. He says things here and there simply because having a reflection outside of a mirror has gotten him back into old habits. Mainly he’s reverted to inserting small talk into the gaping void of silence when it drops between them. It barely matters that Will sometimes doesn’t answer or that if he does his words are almost entirely sarcastic. It doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts.

That component fluctuates, too. He’s either in agony, mourning what he lost and what he’d become in the eyes of every person who ever knew him, or nothing penetrates at all. Mostly he’s untouchable, or he had been. Having someone here who doesn’t think he’s some kind of suave, cannibalistic psychopath is refreshing. It forces him to feel, though he would rather not, all told.

Two hours more on the road, and they end up in Etawah. Will directs the bike immediately toward Hotel Raj Darbar, so Chilton knows he at least planned to get this far on their trek today. He has no idea where the hell Will is taking them if this isn’t the destination. For weeks his existence had been contained within a box, in more than just a physical sense. All the ramblings and complex gear switching in his head had been happening somewhere beyond the flaps, out of his control and beyond what he could understand anymore.

He thinks this is probably why monks go out to live in the desert when they need to find themselves. Meditation takes a person to that black hole inside them that gradually eats all the bad and all the good ever committed, wished, or imagined. There was a lot of filth he let go; there was a lot of beauty, too, amid all the trash.

The voice he hears in his mind that imitates Will whispers, _Pearls before swine._

_What a lot of trash I say._

“There’s only one bed,” Chilton notes blandly, thumping his assembled cane on the floor of the hotel room, immaculately clean and well-lit.

Will shrugs. “So sleep on the floor.”

Chilton tuts, “You’re incredibly chivalrous when you like to be, Will Graham.”

“I have a rule about chivalry where ex-psychiatrists are concerned.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” Will says seriously, toeing off his shoes until he’s standing in his socks and stripping off his jacket.

Chilton feels his neck flush, and he glances pointedly in the other direction, busying his fingers with the grooves in the cane where the pieces come unscrewed.

“Well, what is it?”

“I drive.”

He startles at Will’s voice just over his shoulder. They’re not standing especially close, but there he is, watching Chilton with a funny, halfway muddled expression on his face and cloudy eyes to match. It probably means something that could tell Chilton the whole world and then some about what Will’s thinking right now, what he means to do, how any of this can ever be resolved…but Will’s just looking at him, isn’t he, Chilton thinks dully.

_Just two people looking at each other with a pitiful shortage of anything halfway interesting to see._

It’s unpleasant is what it is, but not because Chilton’s shy. He hasn’t been shy since high school when he first learned how to play the system to his advantage. Sure, living like a hermit hasn’t done wonders for his sociability, but that doesn’t mean he’s reverted to some uncharacteristic demureness that hasn’t been his since boyhood. The unpleasant thing is how little he measures up to Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It’s always been unpleasant. Even Gideon could see it, though he isn’t bitter about it anymore—ridiculous thing to hold a grudge against a dead man and one who went so horribly, even if he had done deplorable things in life.

Chilton ran his own hospital. He had his dream house: a beautiful big place of his own with pristine white corridors, chic furniture, and clean, polished doors. His studies were published when he wrote them; people knew his name. He’d touched greatness. It had felt like enough, but it never was.

One frantic point of emptiness that Chilton does not think about in detail while under Will’s gaze is that nobody loved him.

_Have you got someone you need to call?_

Chilton blinks frantically, flustered when Will just proceeds to look at him. “What?”

“What was the other reason?”

_I needed to hear a familiar voice._

Chilton mumbles, uncomfortable, “What other reason?”

“You said _Cuckoo’s Nest_ was your reason for becoming a psychiatrist, but only part of it. What else decided you?”

“I was a lousy surgeon,” he drawls, bored.

Will gives him a flat stare, unimpressed at the half-truth. Chilton sighs and rolls his eyes at their stalemate. He crosses the room for the curtain rack and throws it open wide to expose the blackened night sky descended upon Uttar Pradesh. Will lets him look for a while, pretending very believably like he means to respect Chilton’s wishes and leave him be with his thoughts.

Instead of doing that he sits patiently on the bed just behind him, folding his legs and holding his knees in a loose, relaxed grip. Chilton taps his cane on the shiny tile, thinking, organizing, editing. He decides no and rounds the bed to flee into the bathroom and splash his face and stare emptily into the mirror. There are dark circles under his eyes and he needs to cut his hair. When he comes back out, which is some time later, the lights have gone out in the room. 

He can only see at all because the city lights from the open window illuminate the room once his eyes adjust to the darkness. Will’s curled up on the side nearest the window and farthest from the door. Chilton follows his lead, clenching his jaw while working his jacket, jeans, and shoes off. He keeps everything else on and slides cautiously onto his side, almost paranoid about keeping a safe, respectable distance between them.

They’ve had a hellishly long day, and Chilton’s had a disastrous month and a half leading up to it. The minute his head hits the pillow he’s out cold. If he dreams, he forgets. If he forgets, it’s wonderful.

\--

The hotel room is dark still when Chilton blinks his eyes open. In his sleep he migrated to the middle of the bed, and his current bedmate is nowhere to be seen. It must still be nighttime judging by the black canvas of sky outside the large window. Chilton looks around and sees light under the bathroom door. He tries to fall back asleep but can’t relax into the lingering drowse. The path to the door is unobstructed, but there’s no desire to go out; nothing compelling him to leave.

The irony that he’s become a willful prisoner by evading arrest does not amuse him.

He hears water running in the sink and sits up. There’s no use trying to fool Will. If he can’t sleep, he’s not going to lie down and pretend to be unbothered. They’ve been on the road all day, and Will has told Chilton next to nothing about the circumstances in Baltimore. All he’d said was that Jack Crawford could be persuaded to believe that Chilton is innocent.

Well, not guilty. Not innocent, certainly, but not guilty, not for this mess of blood and abuse and violence. He would accept complicity. Hannibal made damn sure all of them were complicit, in exceedingly ruinous ways. A shot at escape for any of them now feels like a long shot.

Chilton’s not ready when the bathroom door swings open and Will walks out. It’s obvious Will hadn’t anticipated his being awake, though his face isn’t surprised. His steps stutter as their eyes meet and he stops in the doorway. “Did I wake you?”

“Not sure.” Chilton laces his fingers together in his lap. “Never was a light sleeper, before all this.”

“Do you usually have trouble staying asleep?”

“Nowadays, you mean? If somebody drops a glass in the neighboring room I’m up and out the door before I can think twice about it,” Chilton answers sourly, something like a scowl on his face.

“You’ve adapted. That’s generally a good thing.” Will leans against the doorframe, the picture of casual ease. “Bad dreams?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe you won’t,” Will offers, sounding characteristically blasé and uncharacteristically optimistic.

Stillness settles over them, comforting and improbably soft. Drowse clings to it and makes him relax right through his shoulders. Attempting to be subtle, he lets himself sink into the headboard at his back. There’s a shift in the atmosphere when Will twists so the doorframe comes up right in between his shoulder blades and shuts him out from the lull. The movement closes off the spark of connection that skittered between them for a mere handful of seconds, jars it into something labored and artificial.

Chilton clears his throat, cuts the aborted moment short before it can fester in the awkwardness. “Where are we going tomorrow?”

“Are you up for travel?” Will’s voice is musical, nearly playful in its sonorous quality. “You did better today than I thought you would.”

“Thank you,” Chilton drones, dropping his head forward and dragging his hands over his face.

He doesn’t hear Will move away from the bathroom door. Movement on the other side of the bed tells him where he’s gone, though. He brings the smell of rain with him; it fills Chilton’s nose, strong and peripherally minty. Briefly he imagines the scent as an amalgamation of molecular particles, tangible and susceptible to alteration like any other substance: humidity clinging to the space between the ground and the place just above the grass, drenched leaves shivering under the touch of a dry breeze, the distant suggestion of wet earth after the rain…

“Frederick.”

His eyes fall open. There’s a warm hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. “You dozed off,” Will explains, voice lowered but not exactly hushed.

“Oh.” Through his sleeve, the palm overlaying his scapula is warm, deceptively light.

“We’ve got a few hours before sunrise.”

“That’s nice,” he replies, voice croaking as he resists the urge to flinch away from Will’s hold on him. It would do little to help. Their bondage runs much deeper than futile physical resistance could repair.

“You should rest.”

“I’m not tired.” He suppresses a yawn and avoids Will’s gaze.

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes, I am.” Chilton nods dully.

_Like that’s news to anyone._

Will draws his hand back and taps Chilton on the arm. “Lie down.”

It’s frightening, though the irrationality of it upsets Chilton more than the fear itself. His life afforded him many luxuries before, security being prized among them. This interpersonal fear, the dread of intimacy that never falls far from betrayal, frequently terrorized him, even when he was never in any danger of suffering its fallout. It terrorizes him now, poses a bigger threat than ever before. Even so, a big part of him wants to sink down under the press of Will’s hand and let himself be handled, offensively lurid turn that his thoughts have taken.

_Don’t kid yourself, Frederick,_ his mind whispers to him, remarkably uncanny for its matching Will in pitch, accent, and attitude. He glances at Will then, disturbed that his lips don’t move to synchronize with the voice in his head. _He’s miles above you._

The incongruity of it confounds him completely, makes him shut his eyes against all of it—the Will that breathes in the dendrites outlining his brain and feeding messages to his subconscious, the Will touching him mildly, innocent enough for a man condemned wrongfully to guilt, the personal salve of his free will that he mistook for dead but that had merely been comatose all this time.

“Going to wash my face,” Chilton mumbles, the only response he can think to give that feels moderately safe. He slides off the bed, out of Will’s grip and out of confinement. Will lets him go without argument, and when Chilton comes back Will is gone. It’s easier that way, he finds. Maybe he picked up on Chilton’s discomfort and slipped away downstairs to make phone calls or move his money around.

Too distracted to try sleeping and restless now that his temporary respite has been snatched away, he goes for the rack bag on the floor at the foot of the bed. He roots around, guided by silver chinks of moonlight filtering in through the sliver of glass sunken between the parted drapes. The tilkut is inside, tempting but only a little bit. More than that, the book with the stamps inside catches his attention. It’s right underneath the clear, wrinkled bag of tasty snacks. He takes it out and plucks the shiny strip from between the pages. There’s writing on the lined sheaves inside, and the map edges out, too, not to be ignored.

Will’s notes are indecipherable. Chilton half-wonders if he graded papers in such a difficult hand and whether his students could tell what his marks meant. There are several circles on the map, places to reach in their short journey together. They’ve hit Patna, Bodh Gaya, the River Sone at Dehri, Allahabad, Kanpur, and Etawah. Chilton’s heart sinks when he sees that there’s only one unfulfilled point on the map, that of the Taj Mahal. Another stamp has since disappeared, the one that read, _Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan._

Strange that he remembers it, not that that amounts to much. He probably couldn’t spell it correctly on the first try.

_Huh,_ he muses, the single thought bland and in his own voice. _One stop and three stamps to go._

He supposes that’s fair. They can polish off their tour of the sights, and then he can go back to the tiny cell and routine that became his dwelling and his life, interchangeably. Will doesn’t come back while he’s awake but sometime after he’s fallen back under. Chilton stirs out of the blackness sleep brings right as the sky is bruising deep purple with the approaching dawn. The body beside him emanates warmth and slack vulnerability. Will sleeps with his shoulders sagged and his face turned away toward the window. The sun will wake him once it climbs a bit higher in its course.

When the reality that he very much wants to see Will’s face unburdened by worry in unconsciousness, Chilton flees the bed for a shower. He draws the line at watching another man sleep—not that he’s never done it, like when he was a lot younger and at least a few bolts looser in college. It’s always been a topic of pride for him that he could say things had changed since then; he _has_ changed, _is_ different—is _so_ different.

His teeth are chattering when he steps out of the stall and huddles pathetically in a fluffy towel. Will left him plenty of hot water. Chilton didn’t use any of it.

Telling himself that he’s being ridiculous does nothing to offset the buzzing under his skin, nor does it clear the jumble of his thoughts. They’re less than thoughts, even. More accurately, they’re strobes of light and implication, flares of confused sensation. His brain supplies glimpses of sight and flutters of sound, prods of flavor, odor, and kinesis. 

“You aren’t doing this,” he mutters under his breath, irritated at the very real possibility of having to hear his chastisement in Will Graham’s voice _again_ when all he wants to do is not think about him. “There’s no reason to do this. _Stop doing it_.”

_You don’t want to stop._

“I’ve done things I didn’t want to do,” Chilton mouths back, frustrated and struggling to get his previously worn shirt back over his head. “There are always going to be things I don’t want to do that I have to do.”

He’s lost his fucking mind.

God help him, he’s talking circles around himself just so he won’t have to hear the voice in his head ridicule him anymore. Freud said something about monsters, he thinks, maybe. The full quote doesn’t find its way back to him, nor does the bare meaning extracted, but he knows well enough what’s happened to him. If he’d stayed in Baltimore, Alana Bloom would have sneered at him as if he were a filthy little worm and said to Jack Crawford, not a single doubt in her voice, _He’s suffered a psychotic break._

_Don’t let Will see. One stop and three stamps, Frederick. You’re nearly out of the woods._

“ _And then what?_ ” There isn’t even a way for him to know _whose_ voice snarls out of him. The singular concern he has is not waking Will with his apparent insanity. It would mean questions, the kind he’ll actually need to answer but doesn’t ever want to.

He peeks his head out of the door after smacking the light switch off and sighs his relief at discovering Will none the wiser to his evident downward spiral. Chilton thinks about getting back into bed but decides against it. He relinquished bed sharing a long time ago. It would be ill-advised to grow accustomed to it again at this juncture, ill-advised serving as a euphemism for masochistic and buffoonish. Instead he gets his trousers and his shoes on, leaving behind his cane equally for the attention it would draw if he took it and to signal to Will that he means to come back.

Outside the Hotel Raj Darbar, Chilton takes slow, sweeping strides through shadowy back alleys and down forgettable storefronts. It’s like it was in Bangkok, dark and chilled and silent all the ways he needs for it to be silent. The low, steady hum of traffic a ways off soothes him, allows the tautness in his muscles to drain. His wet hair makes him shiver occasionally, but he’d picked up his coat before slinking out of the room and his neck is covered adequately enough.

He bets that even if he does get sick it’ll be after Will leaves him, and that would be every bit the same as not getting sick at all. In any case he doesn’t worry. It’s one of those mornings where nothing touches him, nothing but the occasional brush of cold under his clothes. The weather won’t be with them today, but it won’t be against them either. That’s something.

Will is sitting at the writing desk near the bed when Chilton comes back an hour later, risen with the sun as Chilton expected. The assembled cane is laid out across his lap, harmless and loose under his relaxed, open hands. Chilton stares at him and closes the door without making a sound.

“Did you walk a path?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel better?”

“As opposed to what?”

“Sometimes,” Will murmurs, running his knuckles from the handle to the base of the cane and then back up as if he were dutifully sharpening a sword, “when I hear the dogs barking in my sleep, the sound of it manifests in my dreams.”

Chilton waits, a slow, cold terror accumulating in his chest.

“You were talking.”

“Was I.”

“In my dream you were.”

“Fascinating.” He adamantly does not want to discuss it.

“What don’t you want to do?” Will asks levelly, even though Chilton is clearly retreating, leaving him behind to limp for the window as he did before. It’s more pronounced now, the dent in his gait. When his back starts to ache he drops down to sit on the bed, still warm from Will’s body.

It’s half a dirty word and half a threat— _body._

“If I’ve made you uncomfortable…”

_He meant to, you know he meant to, he wants you crazy he can control you if you’re crazy you know that’s how it works better than anyone, better than anyone except Hannibal Lecter._

“I didn’t want to be a psychiatrist,” he almost shrieks, the words ripped out of him like skin flayed from bone, like an exorcised spirit vacating the crippled husk of his fleshy catacomb—tearing through biology, psychology, spirituality, et cetera. He sucks in a breath, desperate to make it stop and go silent like it was just a few minutes ago, outside under the cold, lightless morning. “I wanted to be a surgeon. Th-that was…Neila had a daughter, my niece, Laurel—not my actual niece because we were cousins but the closest I ever came to having a niece. She had cy-cystic fibrosis.”

“Chilton,” Will says uncertainly, and Chilton has no idea what the difference is between Will using his first name and Will using his last name; he doesn’t know if there’s _supposed_ to be a difference. They both feel just the same to him.

It’s clear Will wants him to stop, but he can’t. The ride doesn’t stop just because they’re standing still. He refuses to stop. “Laurel was an infant still when they diagnosed her. It was…it was so bad. It was ruthless—she could never breathe.” Chilton can hardly breathe himself. It’s apropos, after everything. He’s gasping, for breath and for mercy he could never deserve. “Neila just loved her. I never wanted children and I _don’t_ want children, but I remember wishing that…that I could love like that, that I could be that generous and wholeheartedly devoted to someone.”

He’s about to go on about the sickness, about how aggressive it was in its destruction of Laurel’s tiny body, how it rejected the lung transplant after four months of false hope, how Neila screamed when the thing that ended up killing her daughter was a drunk behind the wheel of an obnoxious Italian car who drove up onto the sidewalk and crushed everything in her wake: the oxygen tank, Laurel’s bright purple backpack, and a ways further off, her glittery hair clip that flew off of her upon impact.

The hands on his shoulders bring him to a screeching halt. “What does it matter to you,” he whispers, shivering.

_It doesn’t._

Why would anyone care about him? No one cares about a filthy little worm. People ask questions all the time without caring about the answers, without giving a damn about meaning, intention, history, regret. Will Graham should have liked to see Jack Crawford haul Chilton away and arrest him for crimes he didn’t commit, for lives he didn’t end.

“What did I say about wallowing,” Will reprimands him, if his monotonous drag of speech can be called a reprimand. “You shouldn’t have gone outside.”

“Well, I did.”

Will sighs. “You gave yourself a fever.”

Chilton swats at his hands, too hard if he’s being perfectly honest. It doesn’t matter. Will could subdue him if it was his wish to do so. “Don’t.”

“Get back in bed. I’m going to bring you something to eat.”

There’s no room for discussion, so Chilton takes off his coat, his shoes, and shimmies out of his trousers as Will’s briskly walking out into the hallway. Chilton can’t even be bothered to feel scandalized for the door opening right as he’s shaking one leg to free himself of the wrinkled, deflated material. He wonders how his behavior would be treated at the hospital—he very carefully does not call it _his_ hospital.

They would have shoved anti-depressants down his throat and given him over-the-counter drugs to break his fever. It’s what he would have done anyway. He doesn’t know who’s running things in his stead, though he sort of likes the idea of Alana Bloom taking over for him.

She would clean up the corruption he’d planted and dole out proper care where proper care was due rather than trying to cheaply advance herself the way he had tried to advance himself. No matter how much he talks about her weakness for Hannibal Lecter and her absurd conviction that Chilton is a serial killer and a literal consumer of human flesh, he knows brilliance when he encounters it; that’s why he had befriended—he thought—Hannibal Lecter and fixated on Will Graham to the point of obsession. Alana Bloom was a more subliminal rival than either Hannibal or Will, but she was his rival all the same.

Alana Bloom is the compatriot to both his faulty, smudged idols. She is the equal to them that he would never be. He would laugh for hours if she had taken his old position. It would be the icing on the cake, it really would.

“Broth,” Will says a while later, holding a steaming bowl under Chilton’s nose. He blinks his eyes open, confused. “Vegetable broth. Eat.”

_Fuck off_ , he doesn’t say.

“First you want me to sleep, then you want me to eat. Next thing I know—”

“I’m making you take pills?” Will asks wryly. “They’re on the nightstand. You can have this or those first, but you’re doing both.”

“It’s rude to eat in front of you if you don’t have anything for yourself,” Chilton mumbles irately, scooping up the anti-pyretics—that’s _probably_ what they are—off the nightstand and knocking them back. He gulps a few drinks of water from the bottle Will hands him, neatly dexterous and prepared for all of it, if Chilton does say so himself.

“I have crepes.”

“Indian crepes?”

“Don’t be judgmental,” Will tuts, sticking the steaming bowl under Chilton’s nose again. It’s large and shallowly filled with broth so as not to heat up along the sides where he holds it. “They’re lentil.”

“Hmm.” Chilton takes the bowl from him, not caring to be spoon-fed like a child. “Well, let’s see them then.”

Will huffs, put out, and procures the covered plate from the kitchen. He unveils the crepes, yellow in color and resembling hash browns but for their texture. They eat in silence, and Chilton’s head swims.

“I’m sorry for pushing you.”

“No, you aren’t,” Chilton says, with little care for what that actually means but knowing that it’s probably true. Statistically, people like hurting him. Recent events only prove that point.

“I didn’t think you’d lose it like that,” Will says, quite honestly.

“Well,” Chilton starts, eating so he doesn’t have to finish the stillborn statement.

“In my defense, you wanted something like that out of _me_ back when you had the means to make it happen.”

Chilton laughs—a laugh in sound and nothing more. “I never had the means to crack you open and make you sing, Will.”

“The song you wanted wasn’t the truth.”

“The song you asked for is,” Chilton murmurs wistfully, cautiously stirring his broth and staring down at the leafy bits of green and orange added in for flavor. “But you didn’t want it after all.”

After a long wait of pregnant silence that’s muddled by chewing and Chilton’s spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl, Will replies, softly, “That wasn’t the way I wanted you to sing it.”

“The presentation is everything,” Chilton says, the tremble in his voice obscured by the lilting tone of mockery.

“The situation drives the presentation. You were uncomfortable.”

“Do you mean to say that I wasn’t the one driving?” Chilton cocks his head to the side, amused. “I thought you had a rule about former psychiatrists trying to take the wheel from you.”

“There’s a fine line between robbing someone else of their personhood and completely resigning your own autonomy,” Will grits out, setting his fork down. “I don’t need you to do both to be in control of _my_ faculties. I don’t need to control _you_ to be in control of myself or the situation.”

For some reason, the statement blips in and out of focus in the back of his mind. Chilton recalls a conversation he had at dinner with Hannibal. They were speaking about Gideon; Hannibal exposed the nature of what Chilton did to him in therapy—the psychic driving. What had Hannibal said?

_Someone who already doubts their own identity can be more susceptible to manipulation…the subject must not be aware of any influence._

But a man who feels the push, like Gideon did, will begin to push back, won’t he? Gideon had done it by becoming exactly who Chilton told him he was all along. Everyone told _Will Graham_ he was what Hannibal told them he was. But Chilton doesn’t think he ever doubted his own identity. He’d spent enough time trying to get inside his mind that he was sure of it, in fact.

So that left the simplest option—Occam’s razor. The fine line between surrendered autonomy and stolen personhood is freely given cooperation. Where Hannibal pushed, Will would then have to pull solely as a matter of keeping his balance. To stop himself from being shoved around, he had to play the game according to House rules.

Hannibal Lecter makes those rules.

“You don’t want to stop,” Chilton breathes, roughly setting down the nearly empty bowl on the nightstand. “You don’t _want_ to _stop_.”

Will’s face goes perfectly blank, perplexed. “What?”

“You…” Chilton blinks, anger bleeding into him from all sides and blurring his vision. “My God, you don’t want to catch him at all, do you?”

“What are you talking about,” Will _growls_ , the kind of sound that causes an animal’s hackles to bristle on end.

Chilton thinks it means he’s hit a nerve, touched on something near to the truth. A chill creeps down his spine. “You don’t want him to give up what he is; you don’t want to stop being what you are, you—Jesus _Christ_ , you…”

_If not for psychotic murderers hiding in plain sight,_ Will had asked him. _How else would you go after the one who framed you?_

“You’re just like him,” Chilton whispers brokenly, throat constricting around the painful emotion trying to germinate inside his chest. “Oh, my God, you’re just like him.”

Will protests, “I’m not,” something exasperated to his tone that Chilton just doesn’t believe, can’t even begin to trust. “Chilton—” He stands.

“No—God, get—” He flounders off of the bed, taking the top blanket with him and temporarily tangling himself in the mess. Will is waiting for him at the foot of the bed, his only other option being to vault over the bed and run for the door. His side already hurts enough from diving down to the floor, not to mention the lightheadedness trying to take him off his feet.

Will’s hands are up, palms facing Chilton. He learned young that people do that when they’re compensating for something, when they’re trying to make you believe in them and they don’t necessarily deserve it.

“I didn’t let you flee the country so I could come out here and murder you in a nice hotel, Chilton.”

“Then you won’t mind if I _leave_.”

“I would mind, actually, because we aren’t finished yet.”

“What the hell does that mean? You want me to see the Taj Mahal with you, endure the last three stamps, and ride back to Bhutan like a couple on holiday?”

“We are a couple on holiday.”

“Oh, _fuck you,_ Will Graham. It was good for a laugh, and I wish I could see the look on Hannibal Lecter’s sculpted _European_ face when he pieces it all together, but I’m done. I am _finished_ , even if you aren’t. I _get_ to say no to you.”

And that resonates; something about it does. Will drops his hands to his sides, the fight going right out of him like a flame extinguished by breath or by a too-strong breeze. He says, “Okay.”

Chilton swallows and crosses his arms. “What, like, _leave, then_ , okay?”

“I’ll take you back tomorrow if that’s what you want.”

“If that’s what I…what I want is to not die.”

“I already told you I’m not here to hurt you.”

“You said you weren’t here to _murder_ me. That doesn’t mean you won’t hurt me.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

He takes a ragged breath in and out, in and out. “You’re unbelievable.”

“That’s exactly the point, that no one believed me,” Will mumbles with some of his trademark attitude slipping back in now that the conflict has been defused. “If you want to take the day, I’ll go to Taj Mahal by myself and come back for you in the evening.”

“How long’s the drive out?” Chilton asks, not looking at Will as he brushes past him to get back to his side of the bed without climbing over the mattress.

“It’s about two hours.”

“When?”

“Are you coming with me?”

Chilton bites back his groan and falls into bed. “Yes.”

“Then we’ll see about going when you wake up.”

“What will you do in the meantime?”

“Send the other two stamps.”

“How are you choosing them?” Chilton fumbles with the blanket, all thumbs and tired elbows.

“Every few miles in a new direction there’s a vendor with a different set of postcards that I haven’t sent yet. As long as they’re varied enough, it’ll look like I covered more ground than I did.”

“Tactical.”

“It’ll look like I’m scatterbrained,” Will says offhandedly with a shrug.

Chilton hums, rubbing at his forehead, and drawls, “That’s exactly the point.”

“Yes, it is.”

Will goes, and Chilton sleeps with the drapes fully drawn. He dreams for a while; he dreams that he’s holding an unruly knot of wilted carnations and scorched roses. The thorns dig into his arms, and he bleeds all over everything. Neila takes them from him and screams Laurel’s name over the crash of compressed metal. The next thing he knows there’s a single gunshot followed by static.

\--

The Taj Mahal is bigger and dustier in person than Chilton expected it to be. They get there a little after nine in the morning, and Chilton sits on the bike while Will mails out his last postcard. He has half a mind to ask if he can lick the stamp, but the last thing they need is hard evidence putting the two of them in the same place at the same time. Never mind that Bhutan is probably burned for Chilton now and he’ll need to find somewhere else to camp out until this whole thing blows over, which it might not ever.

Will stands around after and takes pictures, sometimes looking really interested in the quality of his shots but sometimes looking bored out of his mind. That description doesn’t quite work for Will, now that Chilton’s gotten a close look at him and how he operates. He doesn’t believe a person with a mind like Will’s got could ever be bored. Boredom comes about from a lack of thought-provoking activity, and Will barely needs a breeze for a stimulating thought to strike him and carry him away. Chilton learned that about Will fairly quickly while their arrangement at the hospital was still underway—back when Chilton could observe Will and poke at him all he wanted without consequence.

Except that isn’t exactly right either. These are the consequences, right here, pretending to be just another tourist snapping photos on a digital camera. Even if they only have the rest of today or an hour or five minutes left of this freeze-frame escape, Will Graham is going to haunt Chilton for the rest of his life. Chilton will be cursed always with the knowledge that his curiosity was pointed all along at the wrong person entirely and that he helped the real devil cement his victory over all of them. Maybe Will means it when he says he’s going to catch Hannibal. Maybe Chilton’s fever dreams about Will’s being in on it with Hannibal are founded in nothing but blank, paranoid fear.

If he is right, he hasn’t the smallest means of testing his hypothesis. An untested hypothesis is nothing to no one. Maybe it meant something to Chilton once, but what can it mean here in Uttar Pradesh? The Taj Mahal stares down at him while he sweats on the back of the rented motorcycle, still coming down from last night’s fever.

And isn’t that the most precious bit of irony—able-bodied and quick-witted Will Graham carting Chilton around while he recovers from a particularly unsettling battle with the high temperatures boiling in his brain.

It’s absurd how the tables turn.

Will returns to the bike and they ride back to Bhutan most of the day, stopping when they need to for food or fuel or cows. They stop again at the Sone, and Will doesn’t ask about Neila or Laurel but Chilton tells him anyway because it doesn’t matter anymore whether his secrets matter or not. After Will leaves, there will be no one left for him to tell stories to. Maybe all the while, that had been the point of Will asking. It would never have mattered to him, but Chilton?

_I didn’t think you’d let it get to you._

_Sic semper tyrannis._

It takes a long time to get back to Bhutan. They stop in Bodhgaya for the night even though there’s no need for it and sleep in separate beds. There’s nothing frightening or intense about it. Chilton figures Will’s already gotten a satisfying enough rise out of him every other time their momentum’s been sectioned off and reduced to zero.

Thinking about the solitude that will come again when Will leaves drives Chilton a very placid, very unsettling kind of crazy. He doesn’t speak about it. Neither does Will. They just keep to themselves and go to bed early. The charade is mostly finished. Will’s postcards have all been mailed off and the stamps all used up. He’s taken his photographs and bought little souvenirs to put on his bullet-sprayed mantle or to give away to his colleagues at the BAU. Chilton doesn’t really have a handle on what the plan is for Will once he heads home. They’d joked a lot about some kind of quasi-erotic candlelit dinner and a coy exchange of tiny Bangladesh memorabilia Will had brought home _just for Hannibal_. Somewhere in all that mess, Chilton pitched how funny it would be if Hannibal pieced it together right then.

They’re doing this because it’s supposed to be funny. After all the gore and violence that had brought them to this point—and after several other revelations that Chilton doesn’t postulate were even remotely meant to happen—they’d latched onto this scheme. They’d been desperate enough to take something from Hannibal that this miniscule delight seemed like enough for them to risk exposure.

It’s a testament to how little they have anymore. The voice in the back of Chilton’s mind that speaks in Will’s voice likes to tell him Hannibal will scoff at their adventures.

_Is this the best you could do?_

_I’ve taken your life away and you respond with postcards?_

But Chilton clings to hope anyway that Hannibal will be petty enough, jealous enough, greedy enough, vain enough, proud enough, or haughty enough to take offense. The only thing he wants is to shock and appall Hannibal. It’s the best he can do, and he’s long reconciled how pitiful that is with himself. Hardly anything about the plan working relies on Chilton. He doesn’t have delusions about that either. This journey is not about him or his life or his innocence—or lack thereof.

The plan hinges on Hannibal’s arrogance, and on Will’s ensnaring him. If something bigger could come from it or if Will is actually planning to use this hot mess for the furthering of even worse calamity, Chilton is glad he’s got nothing to do with it. He’s genuinely relieved, even if the approaching silence scares him to death.

In their shared room at Bodhgaya, Chilton wakes in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason to find Will sitting upright in his bed staring at the wall. He tries ignoring him for a few minutes but finds himself unable to sleep, present circumstances as they are. Will doesn’t respond to Chilton hissing his name at him, and while he does blink when Chilton throws—lightly tosses a brochure at his head, he doesn’t budge an inch. Chilton rubs his forehead with an agitated hand, throws the blankets off himself, and stomps over to Will’s bed barefoot to poke his arm with one wary finger. Will looks at him after a stalled moment, but his eyes are glazed over and his expression is lax. He’s asleep. Chilton guessed he would be.

He swears under his breath and whispers, “Will, lie down.”

“Miles above you,” Will mumbles through his lips, and Chilton’s blood goes cold.

“You’re not doing this to me while you’re _asleep_ , Will Graham. Lie down and go to sleep.”

“Not tired,” he murmurs, though his eyes do close, thankfully.

Chilton risks pushing at his shoulder, gently, and recoils when Will’s eyes snap open and his body stiffens all over. They stare at each other. Will lifts an unthinking hand to his arm where Chilton touched him for a second if that and lays his hand over a section high up on his biceps. He looks betrayed in the moments before his expression clears and he turns to lie on his side facing away from Chilton whose hand is still vaguely stretched out. Chilton closes his eyes and only just refrains from smacking his forehead with his palm.

The healed over bullet wound.

“I’m sorry,” he says—for whatever his apology is ultimately worth to Will.

Will doesn’t reply. Chilton stands at his bedside for a long time and then retires to his own bed, confused and sick to his stomach of half-truths and falsities and outright lies.

He’s sick of it. _Chilton_ is sick of it. He wonders if that’s any kind of gauge as to what Will could be feeling but quickly decides there’s no way he can use himself as a model. Will isn’t a different kind of person from Chilton to be measured and deciphered. He’s just a person. People don’t like to be found out when they haven’t offered themselves first.

_That wasn’t the way I wanted you to sing it._

Wasn’t it?

The thought compels Chilton back to his own bed where he doesn’t sleep for the next few hours until sunrise. He hears Will getting up behind him, and when the bed dips at his back, he turns to look up at Will without saying the words he probably _should_ be saying. He’s said too much to Will already that the necessary words don’t have the weight of belonging in the silence rising up between them like fog. It wouldn’t mean anything after so much wasted air that Chilton sees it now—sees what he’s done. Even as it’s come into focus for him, he isn’t sure his perspective now forgives his ambition, his curiosity, his willingness to break Will’s back to elevate himself.

He wonders if it will be enough for Will to forgive Hannibal those same things. Hannibal is greedy enough, arrogant enough, and brave enough to ask for forgiveness. Maybe that will make him worthy of receiving it. Maybe that will be why Chilton never can, but even in this respect, Will’s forgiveness is not about Chilton.

Forgiveness isn’t about the person responsible for doing harm. It’s about the person who’s been harmed. It’s about that person agreeing to let go of something that’s wounded them, left them with scars—as from a bullet or from a betrayal of trust, of love, or of confidence.

Despite his inability to repeat his clearly spoken but half-hearted apology from last night, Will searches Chilton’s eyes for a moment, finds something there or doesn’t, and says, “I forgive you.”

Will leaves the room a while later with the rack bag and leaves Chilton’s cane on the nightstand. He follows out half an hour later and they ride back to Bhutan in silence. There’s nothing left to be said between them. All of it has reached its resolution. Will drops him off at his familiar little nest in Bhutan and leaves without a further word. They have nothing else to discuss—no further business to be worked through.

Chilton walks his preset path outside with the cane Will bought for him and thinks for a long time.

_Is this the best you could do?_

_I’ve taken your life away and you respond with postcards?_

It’s too late for him to do anything, but as he sits alone in his room eating cubed bits of mango, he wonders at why Will’s voice is still the one he hears telling him those words. He can hardly fathom the question or why it makes him feel so thoroughly hollow.

_Everyone knew something about me. They couldn’t see what it really was, not with all the evidence in the way._

_Wind him up and watch him go._

Later when he’s watching the sunrise from the brick wall with the cane leaned up against his knee, he discovers a small, sturdy object lining one of his deeper coat pockets. He plunges his hand in while the rays break over the horizon and removes a small silver spoon from his pocket that he frowns at for about ten seconds in perfect dumbfounded incomprehension. The sun tints the sky a brighter shade of teal and he rotates the spoon to one side and squints at the engravings.

It says ‘Baltimore’ along the handle. The oval bowl of the spoon has a colorful picture of Mt. Vernon Place.

Chilton stares at the tiny utensil in his hand, shivers around a surprised laugh, and clutches the silver spoon in his hand like a lifeline. 

_You don’t want to stop._

_I’m going to catch him._

One of those statements has to be the truth. One day he’ll know which one it is. Until he does, the sun springs Bhutan into a new day and his phone decidedly does not ring.

In his own voice, he thinks, _Have you got someone you need to call?_

The answer, slow coming and softly arrived upon, is no. Chilton sits on the wall thumbing the grooved handle of the Baltimore spoon on his knee and watches the sun climb higher in the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
> 
> From Chuck Palahniuk’s _Fight Club_ : “In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.”
> 
> From Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.”
> 
> Gai Haw Bai Toey (Ji’s soup)  
> http://importfood.com/recipes/chickeninleaves.html
> 
> Khob khun krap > Thai for “Thank you” (when said by a man)
> 
> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S1, E13: _Savoureux_ ): “Wind him up and watch him go. Well, apparently, doctor, this is how I go.”
> 
> “Sic semper tyrannis” is Latin for “such always to tyrants”. John Wilkes Booth shouts this after shooting Abraham Lincoln.
> 
> _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ (1962) written by Ken Kesey.  
>  Film adaptation (1975) directed by Miloš Forman.
> 
> Chilton’s cane  
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/Indian-3-Piece-Handmade-Walking-Cane-Brass-Handle-Inlay-Wood-Stick-Vintage-Style-/321287460048?_trksid=p2054897.l4275
> 
> Tilkut  
> http://nishamadhulika.com/en/504-tilkut-recipe-til-gud-ladoo-recipe.html
> 
> “Pearls before swine,” from Matthew 7:6 (and also referencing Thomas Harris’ _Hannibal Rising_ ):  
> “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.”
> 
> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S1, E7: _Sorbet_ ): “I just get to touch greatness.”
> 
> From S1 E11, _Rôti_ : “Someone who already doubts their own identity can be more susceptible to manipulation…the subject must not be aware of any influence.”  
> (There’s also a quote that I paraphrased that goes along the lines of Gideon felt Chilton pushing him, so he pushed back.)
> 
> Spoon!  
> http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Baltimore-MD-MARYLAND-Enamel-Mt-Vernon-Place-Sterling-Silver-Souvenir-Spoon-FIRE/227582294?gpid=18283950120&gpkwd=&goog_pla=1&gclid=CMSJ1o2mysMCFYRFaQodWGYA4w


End file.
